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Chapter 6 Bliss as an Attribute of the Soul
Statement of the Problem
No psychic act can be said to be purely cognitive, conative or affective. It shows all the three characteristics simultaneously with the allowance that it may be dominated by one or the other. A psychic act, thus, is a unity of cognition, conation and affection. This is the synthetic view of a psychic act. But, when an analytic view-point is adopted, the distinction among the various constituents of a psychic act must have a meaning. Just as conation (darśana) is distinguished from cognition (jñāna) on the attributive level, so also affection must be distinguishable at the same level. Now the problem is whether feeling or affection stands parallel to cognition or it is an aspect of cognition.
Feeling as Distinguished from Cognition
In our own experience the states of feeling and cognition are clearly distinguished. “If I were merely a thinking being, if my soul were not somehow intimately conjoined with my body, I should, for example, know that I am hungry, but not feel hungry.”! Knowledge of hunger and feeling of hunger are different and distinct from each other. At this sta
we do not want to consider how feeling is generated. It will be sufficient for our purpose if we are able to draw a distinction between cognition and feeling. It is possible that we may have a cognition of a feeling and a feeling about a cognition; but this cannot establish the identity of the two. The very
1. Thilly: A History of Philosophy, p. 256
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